Guest post: A lot of psychology may as well be feng shui

Psychological states are too subjective to diagnose, so a lot of psychology may as well be feng shui, until neuroscience is able to establish cause/effect relationships in underlying disorders. The idea that psychology diagnoses “disorders” is also interesting to me, because itimplies that there is something broken – literally un-ordered in the patient, yet it’s equally possible that some of these things are learned behaviors. At this time we can’t tell whether any given person lacks empathy because:

there is an as-yet undiscovered empathy function in the brain, which this person lacks or has damage to

empathy is a learned behavior and this person somehow managed to not learn it

this person has had experiences that have convinced them that empathy is not worth demonstrating, so they (knowingly or otherwise) don’t show it

all of the above

some of the above

some degree of some of the above

It is my opinion that these are vague concepts in the philosophical sense (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness) which means that epistemologically they may be impossible to know objectively. One can make statements of knowledge about such concepts only in reference to one’s own opinion, i.e.: I know I think that person X suffers from antisocial personality disorder which is easily true, but practically useless.

If you approach it reductively, you wind up with the same problem – since “antisocial personality disorder” is a list of behaviors, such as:

failure to conform to social norms

irritability

deceitfulness

etc. Those are also vague concepts. If someone wears white shoes before easter, are they demonstrating failure to conform to social norms, or is the social norm no longer relevant? If someone walks up to another person and licks their face, is that failure to conform, or …? Even “deceitfulness” is tricky – note that the authors of DSM choose the words very very carefully because “deceitfulness” is different from “lying a lot” because “deceit” implies some awareness of the lie on the liar’s part, hedging out someone who is merely mistaken or delusional. And, again, the difference between “deceit” and “mistaken” is vague — all of these are vague concepts.

A shorter form of what I wrote above is that psychology is largely a game of slapping labels on the downstream consequences of unknowns. Too many unknowns.

If you’re concerned about someone’s behaviors (as you perceive them) it’s best to forgo the process of labelling and try to deal as honestly as possible with the behaviors themselves. Acknowledge that those are also vague concepts and labels. But if you are a skeptic you would want to reduce things to facts and let your listener decide. So rather than saying “Marcus exhibited failure to conform to social norms” you can boil it down to “Marcus licked a stranger’s face, and said that’s what he does instead of shaking hands.” Rather than saying “Fred exhibited lack of empathy” you can say “Fred snapped a kitten’s neck with his bare hands and announced it was ‘interesting’ and showed no apparent emotion.” Skeptics are safest when dealing with what they perceive to be facts, though if you want to be a pyrhhonian you can also add “It appears to me now that…” to qualify your statements in order to ensure that your listener remembers they may be hearing your opinions or misperceptions.

Comments

I would have to dig to try and find the reference, but I do realize the citation: my understanding that sociopaths have checked the only measurable difference between their brain responds. Specifically, showed a normal person video of children read that the shreds, say, the limbic system lights up pretty strongly. It gets normal people extremely agitated. Sociopaths, on the other hand, display little to no reaction. In fact, the site of such violence actually has a calming effect.

A shorter form of what I wrote above is that psychology is largely a game of slapping labels on the downstream consequences of unknowns.

So is medicine. We don’t know the exact cause of most cancers. We only understand and treat the downstream consequences. That doesn’t mean we can’t collect a common series of symptoms that all progress the same one label and figure out ways to treat them. That’s how medicine has made progress for centuries.

But the diagnosis should be left to trained professionals and be based on sound scientific studies. For a lay person in casual conversations, these labels are probably more harmful than helpful. If that’s your point, sure. If you’re contending that the entire field of psychology is pseudoscience, though, you’re flirting with denialism.

People have to stop using the term ’empathy’ like it’s one damned thing.

We recognise that ‘sight’ is a whole mass of interconnected eye and brain functions so why do people continually confuse the ability to read emotions with the ability – or compulsion – to share. I think there are maybe half a dozen different definitions in Pinker’s Better Angels… (role-taking, mind-reading, emotional contagion, etc.) and he argues convincingly that none are essential to civilisation compared to rules of good conduct.

Even “deceitfulness” is tricky – note that the authors of DSM choose the words very very carefully because “deceitfulness” is different from “lying a lot” because “deceit” implies some awareness of the lie on the liar’s part, hedging out someone who is merely mistaken or delusional. And, again, the difference between “deceit” and “mistaken” is vague — all of these are vague concepts.?

I don’t see a difference between ‘deceiving’ and ‘lying’ here; lying also implies awareness on the liar’s part. If they believe what they are saying is true they aren’t liars, they are mistaken; if they know it is untrue they are liars; if they don’t care one way or the other they are bullshitters.

But the diagnosis should be left to trained professionals and be based on sound scientific studies. For a lay person in casual conversations, these labels are probably more harmful than helpful. If that’s your point, sure. If you’re contending that the entire field of psychology is pseudoscience, though, you’re flirting with denialism.

Quite, which is why I take issue with this:

Psychological states are too subjective to diagnose, so a lot of psychology may as well be feng shui, until neuroscience is able to establish cause/effect relationships in underlying disorders

Dismissing psychological states as ‘inherently unknowable’ rather overlooks the fact that we each have access to at least one set of psychological states; our own.

And since psychopaths, autistics, etc. are – to some extent – capable of reporting our own psychological states, to ignore this fact and for psychologists to concern concern themselves entirely with measurable behavioural traits is to cast our subjectivity into some ‘black box’ like the brains of Skinner’s rats or Pavlov’s dogs.

The idea that psychology diagnoses “disorders” is also interesting to me, because itimplies that there is something broken – literally un-ordered in the patient, yet it’s equally possible that some of these things are learned behaviors.

I fail to see the contradiction or tension here (implied by the word “yet”). Learning means changing your brain. Why can’t you change your brain in a way that is disordered?

I agree that there are a great number of problems with psychological diagnosis, and it sure as hell shouldn’t be something thrown around by amateurs (which, FWIW, several writers on this site have done). But as Ryan Cunningham points out in #4, this does not mean we shouldn’t try, nor that it’s unethical or unscientific to do so until we’ve got all the causal chains figured out.

Shatterface – other people argue that empathy is hugely important to a decent society. I don’t know if that’s what you had in mind by “civilization”…Sadly, civilization can often flourish in profoundly non-decent societies.

Shatterface – other people argue that empathy is hugely important to a decent society. I don’t know if that’s what you had in mind by “civilization”…Sadly, civilization can often flourish in profoundly non-decent societies.

I think treating people with empathy only on the condition that empathy is reciprocated is, at best, cynical, and sets a worrying precedent – particularly when there is no agreement on what ’empathy’ means.

Millgram’s experiments and the Stamford experiment weren’t on psychopaths, they were on ‘ordinary’ people. The first demonstrated most people will suspend empathy if someone in authority tells them to; the latter shows that they will behave inhumanly if they are given power over others. Other experiments – and history – have shown that people will withdraw empathy from those they believe are less than human than themselves.

If you define empathy as quintessentially human you are denying the humanity of those who lack it – and well on the way towards justifying inhuman behaviour yourself.

I didn’t say anything about treating people with empathy only on the condition that empathy is reciprocated – where did you get that?

Actually no, the Milgram experiments didn’t demonstrate that at all; the subjects didn’t suspend empathy, and most even of the ones who pushed the dial all the way up were wretched about doing it.

Also it wasn’t quite that. The subjects obeyed when the lab coats told them the experiment needed them to continue. There was one condition under which they got ZERO compliance and that was when they just ordered them to.

And yes, I know history has shown that people will withdraw empathy from those they believe are less than human than themselves, but that’s just it. The need is to expand empathy, not give up on it.

Excellent points Marcus. Specific behaviors objectively described are best. Some of the confusion represented by examples like this,

Even “deceitfulness” is tricky – note that the authors of DSM choose the words very very carefully because “deceitfulness” is different from “lying a lot” because “deceit” implies some awareness of the lie on the liar’s part, hedging out someone who is merely mistaken or delusional.

…stems from the always present perspective problem. A deceived person feels deceived, but their false understanding of reality may not have been deliberate. Lies are a subset of deception, and people that feel deceived can mistake intentional deception for things like non-literal language use or error riddled summaries by non-experts “suffering” from Dunning–Kruger effect.

The way that I think about psychological states is that they are real and often exist as clusters of similar behavior that exist as overlapping venn diagrams (“psychopathy” is a bunch of similar things). The things can cause the states as a matter of probability look like a bunch of overlapping venn diagrams as well, and the causes are differently related to each other and the state. So the reality of many mental states and their causes in a scientific sense is two sets of venn diagrams. This reality creates several problems.
The first is that probability and degree of intensity is involved at every level and many try to use all of this in black and white ways completely ignoring probability. This is lethal to good transmission of information because these probabilities and intensities don’t go away and error can quickly blow up.
The second is that several things that look similar are being called one thing as a matter of convenience. This is fine for scientists because they tend to accept that the name is a placeholder until they can better separate phenomena. But the public will want to use the words too, and they often get pissed at learning that a word is not useful anymore.
The third is that the causes will likely have unique relationships with each of the things in the sub-states in the “state” cluster. They will differently contribute and often that is context sensitive.
The fourth is that the causes may be related to each other differently in each sub-state in the cluster. They may also be related to other psychological states which can confuse non-scientists trying to conceptually use psychological states in conversations.
The fifth is that causes are not all things that are broken. As you point out “disorder” is used differently by different people. “Disorder” is closer to “atypical” or “farther from average” and does not imply that the thing different from normal is “unnatural” or “undesirable”. One can get to many phenomena from mutation, choice, experience, or exposure. These distinctions often get ignored or remain unlearned depending on a person’s persuasive desires. “Disorder” is defined by both personal and social perceptions.

This whole set of problems is mirrored in the anatomical work being done with respect to mental conditions. I’m pretty well versed in the anatomy of Tourette’s Syndrome and you often see people in reviews discuss the need to separate the effects of co-morbidities (90% of the time TS comes with ADHD, OCD and other things) when interpreting what the structural differences mean. ADHD and OCD have their own anatomical correlates. And genetics mirrors the problem again! The scientists are aware of the problem, but the public often does not care.

The vagueness is in the incompleteness of the science that many want to appeal to. For example most people have a passing familiarity with OCD. Often to the point that many use the term casually when they don’t actually have it. “I have an OCD about that” they will say when what they mean is that it just irritates them. But Obsessions and Compulsions are categories of different sets of feelings of being driven to particular things in perception, and particular actions. They are associated with anxiety and other strong and often debilitating feelings instead of irritation. Obsession and Compulsion look very different when you look at different types of people with OCD and that is resulting in new words which often require the disposal of old words (“insane” is practically useless).
tOCD, or “tourettic OCD” is a new category of OCD to represent a flavor of the cluster “state” normally called OCD. If the specifics matter to anyone you can read about them here.http://beyondocd.org/expert-perspectives/articles/ocd-and-tourette-syndrome-re-examining-the-relationship
The important point is that what society treats as conceptual objects in conversations are not one thing, and what cause them are not one thing either. To avoid linguistic nihilism people need to be willing to accept when their words represent objects, or categories and implicitly take that into account. They also need to be willing to accept it when reality shifts words around as science learns new things. Brain science is in the process of breaking categories into objects at multiple levels and defining how the objects relate to things (other states and each other). New DSMs try to reflect this. That does not mean that we can’t use the categories, just that we need to be more aware of error rates and shifts in what we know of reality (not just unknowns, unknown unknowns). What we have written of history previous to today’s world is less and less applicable to modern use of words, especially in brain and behavior.

Empathy is a category. The self is not a unitary phenomena and is divided into several different selves by researchers (and example is protoself, coreself, and autobiographical self nested into one another). If empathy is the ability to feel the other as the self, this can be altered in many ways via the different selves consciously, unconsciously, genetically, epigenetically (which may map with “historically”), culturally/socially, accidentally (trauma), deliberately and probably other things ending with -ly. Those things are categories too.

Sorry about that! The nutshell is that I’m told by a clinical researcher that normal people find it extremely distressful to watch other people suffer. Sociopaths, by contrast, find it soothing. Trained soldiers react like normal people, BTW–they are good at looking impassive, but their pulse etc. doesn’t lie.

The idea that psychology diagnoses “disorders” is also interesting to me, because itimplies that there is something broken – literally un-ordered in the patient, yet it’s equally possible that some of these things are learned behaviors.

There’s no contradiction there: learning affects not just observable behavior but also thoughts and emotional reactions, and can certainly make them “un-ordered”. Even if, in most cases, we don’t know precisely what’s causing the problem, we do know that some disorders, in some cases, are learned (although it’s unlikely that everyone would be equally capable of learning), and that others are almost certainly not.

At this time we can’t tell whether any given person lacks empathy because:

(…)
empathy is a learned behavior and this person somehow managed to not learn it

Highly unlikely since reactions and behavior indicating empathy are found both in very young humans (infants) and in other species.

this person has had experiences that have convinced them that empathy is not worth demonstrating, so they (knowingly or otherwise) don’t show it

If that’s the case, we would be able to tell, provided we’re allowed to test them: there’s a difference between not showing and not feeling, and we have lots of electronic equipment that can tell the difference.

BTW, are you suggesting they were punished every time they showed concern for others when they were kids, or what? If they just decided that it’s not worth the effort, they didn’t have any to begin with.

Shatterface @5:

People have to stop using the term ‘empathy’ like it’s one damned thing.

I agree.

We recognise that ‘sight’ is a whole mass of interconnected eye and brain functions so why do people continually confuse the ability to read emotions with the ability – or compulsion – to share. I think there are maybe half a dozen different definitions in Pinker’s Better Angels… (role-taking, mind-reading, emotional contagion, etc.) and he argues convincingly that none are essential to civilisation compared to rules of good conduct.

But how do you decide what “good conduct” is?

Shatterface @9:

I think treating people with empathy only on the condition that empathy is reciprocated is, at best, cynical, and sets a worrying precedent – particularly when there is no agreement on what ‘empathy’ means.

Perhaps – so it’s better to be more specific. “Cynical” is a far too nice term if you’re talking about someone not caring about how another person feels, because that other person is not very good at reading emotions. But I don’t think it’s terribly cynical to not care that much about the feelings of people who don’t care about other people any more than the sort of child who pulls the wings off flies cares about flies. I’m afraid that sometimes, nice friendly caring people wanting to treat others with empathy end up fooling themselves, feeling sorry for people who are not suffering at all, just good at manipulating others. They think they “have empathy with” this person, when they’re just projecting something onto them that doesn’t exist. Hopefully, this just results in them being tricked into giving those people money or doing them favours in ways that don’t really harm anyone too much. But sometimes the result is that people who harm others are given the benefit of doubt for far too long, and forgiven when they shouldn’t have been.

Hi Ophelia – long time no view I’m afraid – but here is my take on the psychopath dilemma (bit late to the party, I know):

Assuming this is not a purely hypothetical situation, the best way to ferret someone out is to form a network. I agree with the commenter who said you should talk to people and gain further information on what exactly this X is supposed to be doing. If you feel these people are on to something, and can be trusted, the next step would be to report to each other – unknown to X – on significant things (s)he says/does. You will probably find that X is trying to be all things to all people and may offer contradictory information to different members of the group.

I think the discussion on psychology clarifies that the point of importance is not whether someone meets the criteria for an abstract ‘diagnosis’ but whether their actions are deceitful, selfish and/or harmful. It is how they actually treat other people that will render them either harmless, or a problem to be dealt with.

and he argues convincingly that none are essential to civilisation compared to rules of good conduct

Where do those “rules” come from?

Huckleberry Finn felt guilty because he was breaking the rules of his society. He’d been taught that helping a slave run away was stealing, and stealing was wrong–so wrong it was worthy of eternal punishment.

He decided to go to hell rather than turn Jim in. That was empathy.

Millgram’s experiments and the Stamford experiment weren’t on psychopaths, they were on ‘ordinary’ people. The first demonstrated most people will suspend empathy if someone in authority tells them to; the latter shows that they will behave inhumanly if they are given power over others.

The Milgram experiments showed that people will do what they’re told if they feel that they’re acting as the agent for a person in authority. In other words, many people will feel less responsible for their actions in certain circumstances. (I’ve read Milgram’s Obedience to Authority and while I don’t recall all the detail right now, I do know that he did the experiment many times controlling for different variables.)

As Ophelia says, most of the people who continued to increase the “shocks” in the Milgram experiments did not suspend empathy. They over-rode it. That’s an important distinction. Many participants were traumatized by what they’d done, which is why Human Subject Review Boards won’t let anyone try to replicate the experiments these days.

Other experiments – and history – have shown that people will withdraw empathy from those they believe are less than human than themselves

And from animals. I don’t know whether they “withdraw” empathy or simply don’t feel it to begin with because they don’t perceive those others as belonging to the class of beings with whom they identify. But that’s not an argument for saying empathy isn’t important. Unreliable all by itself, without other things like reason and values and, yes, rules, but I’d trust rules by themselves without the underpinning of pro-social feelings like compassion and sympathy and identification even less.

Whatever you want to call them, people without empathy, people who are comfortable manipulating others and unable to feel remorse, are dangerous people, even when they’re following the Rules (at least the ones they need to follow in order to stay out of trouble.) Think of Wall Street.

As a psychiatrist, I want to comment on diagnosis, psychology and the DSM 5. I think the DSM 5 was started with the hope that there would be more neurobiological correlation with diagnoses. But the brain is complex and there is a lot of variation within illnesses like bipolar, schizophrenia, depression. We definitely need more research on this. Even though there isn’t enough research on neurobiology and diagnoses, there is a lot of research on examining the validity of these diagnoses. It is really is not as useless as feng shui or a ouiji board. It is a double edged sword though. It helps to have everyone most on the same page in terms of diagnosis, and to organize research.
It helps patients know what to expect when they have an illness, but only as long as the patient doesn’t get too caught up in a label. I had a patient who was too focused on her borderline personality diagnosis to explain her problems with interpersonal relationships. She may have this disorder but she also needs to look at her thoughts, especially about herself. Her relationship issues are driven by her view of herself as not good enough, as too flawed.
There is no diagnosis of psychopathy in DSM. There is antisocial personality disorder which is a basically a description of behavior and emotional responses to one’s behavior. The label doesn’t tell you exactly what causes a person to have antisocial personality. there is research on the neurobiology of empathy involving mirror neurons, I think.
To put it more succinctly, psychological diagnoses are useful but you have to be aware of their limitations

The DSM is a product of psychiatry, not psychology. And it’s pseudoscience.

I’m going to be busy for the next couple of weeks so I don’t have time for another discussion, but I will provide once again my list of reading suggestions:

Robert Whitaker, Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic; James Davies, Cracked; Marcia Angell, “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?”, “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” and “‘The Illusions of Psychiatry’: An Exchange” (all available free online); Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure and The Bitterest Pills; Irving Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs; Stuart Kirk, Tomi Gomery, and David Cohen, Mad Science; Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe (I can’t speak to the quality of this one); Brett Deacon, “The Biomedical Model of Mental Disorder: A Critical Analysis of its Tenets, Consequences, and Effects on Psychotherapy Research” (available free online); Jonathan Leo and Jeffrey Lacasse, “Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature” (available free online); Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us.

I will leave – if you don’t mind, Ophelia – a quote from James Davies’ Cracked that I posted recently. Interviewing DSM-III taskforce chair Robert Spitzer, Davies tries to understand the scientific basis on which the diagnoses rest:

…“So presumably,” I asked, “these disorders had been discovered in a biological sense? That’s why they were included, right?”

“No, not at all,” Spitzer said matter-of-factly.

“There are only a handful of mental disorders in the DSM known to have a clear biological cause. These are known as the organic disorders [like epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s disease. These are few and far between.”

“So, let me get this clear,” I pressed, “there are no discovered biological causes for many of the remaining mental disorders in the DSM?”

“Not for many, for any! No biological markers have been identified.”

…[I]f the findings of biology did not help the Taskforce to determine what disorders to include in the DSM-III, then what on earth did?

“I guess our general principle,” answered Spitzer candidly, “was that if a large enough number of clinicians felt that a diagnostic concept was important in their work, then we were likely to add it as a new category. That was essentially it. It became a question of how much consensus there was to recognize and include a particular disorder.”*

…What sprang to mind at Spitzer’s revelation was the point I made in the previous chapter about agreement not constituting proof. If a group of respected theologians all agree that God exists, this does not prove that God exists. All it proves is that these theologians believe it. So in what sense is psychiatric agreement different? Why, when a committee of psychiatrists agree that a collection of behaviors and feelings point to the existence of a mental disorder, should the rest of us accept they’ve got it right?

This community has a moral, intellectual responsibility to look at psychiatry critically.

* If you read Christopher Lane’s Shyness, you’ll see that Spitzer is being far too humble about his own authoritarian and manipulative role here.

SC: “This community has a moral, intellectual responsibility to look at psychiatry critically.” No argument there. It is also equally true that (whatever) community has a moral, intellectual responsibility to look at (whatever) critically – whatever being the claims made by any section of any population. Much of the discussion on B&W is about efforts made by various vested interests to stifle critical examination of those same vested interests.
.
““So, let me get this clear,” I pressed, “there are no discovered biological causes for many of the remaining mental disorders in the DSM?””
““Not for many, for any! No biological markers have been identified.””
.
I get the impression that this quote from this conversation between Spitzer and Davies is an invitation to the reader to conclude that psychiatry as it exists is bullshit: perhaps scientific bullshit, but bullshit none the less.
Am I right there, or have I missed something?

“Psychiatry is arguably the least science-based of the medical specialties. Because of that, it comes in for a lot of criticism. Much of the criticism is justified, but some critics make the mistake of dismissing even the possibility that psychiatry could be scientific. They throw the baby out with the bathwater. I agree that psychiatry has a lot of very dirty bathwater, but there is also a very healthy baby in there that should be kept, cherished, nourished, and helped to grow – scientifically”http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/psychiatry-bashing/

She points out there are no biological markers for migraines but other tools are used to determine the biology of migraines.
When you are faced every day with people suffering, you use the best tools you have to help people. That includes different kinds of therapy, medications, and more research. I want information telling me what works, what doesn’t. In the meantime, I still have to treat patients for their illnesses.

SC, you keep criticizing psychiatry, but you where would you start in terms of studying these diseases. And how many people will die by suicide while we wait for answers

I’m going to have to his this later today or tomorrow, but the idea that psychiatry is pseudoscience is not remotely accurate despite the fuzzyness with which it is able to view us globally. (I think I’ll toss some papers on empathy here too to give an idea about that area). SC I would ask you, what do you have in mind when you say “biomarker”?

To use an analogy to computers, Psychiatry is akin to being the expert capable of describing what sort of programs exist. Programs here are long term objective mind contents, e.g. “mindware”, They learn about how the mindware seems to function globally, how to manipulate the mindware to affect desired changes, and under what sort of conditions different mindware arises. They interface with people and all our cultural particularities first, and universally applicable meat and hardware second (though the use of embodied cognition in psychiatry is getting into the hardware a bit).
Because our picture of how the brain produces the mind is incomplete, it makes sense that this would be one of the most “soft” parts of the brain sciences.

The people using MRIs, tissue slices, histological preparations, and other techniques are hardware experts and they are essentially learning how the analogs to everything from hardrive sectors and bits get transformed into behavior, to analogs to programming languages represented by the many ways that development and experience play with genes, epigenetic programs, neurotransmitters, cells, anatomy and more. All those venn diagrams I mentioned include many examples of unions between psychological states with causes in the hardware realms, and more than simply Alzheimer’s and Huntinton’s. What is meant by “organic disorder” SC?

We don’t know the exact cause of most cancers. We only understand and treat the downstream consequences.

We know what a cancer looks like and that cancers exist. We know that when cancers spread, invade, and interfere with other body functions, they can kill. We understand that cancer is – literally – a “disorder” in which something has gone wrong and there is a clear cause and effect chain. Read PZ’s “what is an oncogene” article over at pharyngula and you’ll see that we understand that cancers are caused by genetic disorders: another step in the chain of cause and effect relationships that allow us to say we know something about cancer.

If psychologists were diagnosing cancer they’d wait ’till you were dead and then come up with a “cancer morbidity syndrome” and say it was diagnosable by some laundry-list of symptoms, some of which might overlap with alcohol poisoning and others of which might be alzheimer’s. But they wouldn’t have any way of relating that diagnosis to masses of mutated growing cells – because, if they did, that would be oncology and not their problem.

If you’re contending that the entire field of psychology is pseudoscience, though, you’re flirting with denialism.

I am contending that psychology is using the scientific method and failing, because of the inherent difficulties in (at this time) establishing causal relationships between the causes of behaviors and their effects.

That’s a lot different from saying “too subjective to diagnose” – which is what I said.

If you’re trying to gallop around the issue that psychology has to contend with self-reported states, you’re ignoring a vast amount of what psychology spends its time trying to deal with. My experience with psychology research is that a tremendous amount of it is devoted to fooling some version of “the truth” out of subjects that are expected to not know they are lying, or to lie deliberately.

Psychological states are too subjective to diagnose because the patient has one interpretation (which may be mistaken, or dishonest) about what they are experiencing, and the diagnoser has another. Those are both highly subjective. That’s a problem! And you can see it’s a problem, when one psychologist applies a laundry list of subjective attributes to a patient and concludes they have XYZZY Syndrome and a year later another psychologist looks at the same patient and concludes they have YZZYX Syndrome. That’s because psychology doesn’t actually have any idea what’s wrong with the patient; it’s not like you can look at a tumor over the course of a year and say “it’s 10% bigger!”

I’m not trying to utterly dismiss psychology. There is evidence that some interventions improve patient experience and survival. That’s a cause and effect relationship established between the intervention and the patient’s outcomes – that’s science. I get that. It’s a start. I don’t think history will judge 20th century psychology kindly, though. History will judge 20th century psychology a bit better than Freud and Jung (who I would say were pseudoscientists) but not much.

Science works by building our understanding of cause and effect forward and backward. Experiment allows us to analyze causality forward (change something under control and see what happens) and careful study may allow us to analyze causality backward as well. Because of the impenetrable barrier of self-reported inner states, it’s very difficult for psychology to analyze backward in the absence of clear disorders. If a patient reports a behavioral change and they do an MRI and discover a tumor in the brain, it’s suddenly a disorder cause/effect situation and it’s no longer a psychology problem – psychology’s making some inroads; they understand that certain neurotransmitters cause certain behavioral states. So right now they’re tweaking those and getting measurable results, but they can hardly be said to really understand what’s going on. Maybe that will come in time. That’s what I mean when I say that hopefully neuroscience will consume psychology.

Consider car engines. Now, psychologists observe that occasionally car engines have massive failures and break apart. They notice that, when this happens, the oil leaks out. So one psychologist calls this “oil flight syndrome” and writes a diagnostic symptom list for it. Another psychologist discovers that the oil in a car’s engine can be changed (!) using a relatively simple procedure. Fringe psychologists replace the oil with urine and discover that increases “oil flight syndrome” and some engine abusers experiment with deliberately running their engines with urine in them because it feels “edgy.” Many psychologists recommend that car’s engine oil be changed periodically and – over time – they discover that changing it more often than 6,000 miles doesn’t really seem to reduce incidences of “oil flight syndrome” but that changing it every 6,000 miles or so reduces “oil flight syndrome” fairly significantly. This is science. The tools and methods of science are being applied. But the psychologists still don’t have any understanding of what “oil flight syndrome” is because they don’t have an understanding of how the engine works, and what viscosity breakdown means, and how bearings fail, and why.

Trained soldiers react like normal people, BTW–they are good at looking impassive, but their pulse etc. doesn’t lie.

Citation?

Being in the military may be an attractive career for individuals who are not “normal people” in how they respond to seeing people die. There are plenty of indications that some people join the military because they are interested in seeing what it’s like to kill.

Consider a volunteer military as a self-selected sample and we’re done with that topic.

The “democratizing” influence on enlistment, of course, is that a lot of people “volunteer” because they need the money or economic opportunity or chance to leave a situation they are stuck in.

The ability to map another person onto us and see them as we see ourselves is a definable cognitive entity and there are parts of the brain that can be shown to be involved in tasks that require such. No we don’t know what all the bits are and no we can’t outline all the subtitles with respect to how it works functionally, but we have information and more than one psychological state with clear alterations in seeing other people as we see ourselves.